Health care graduate certificate programs welcome new faculty member

SUNY Oswego welcomed a new faculty member to their information science program this semester, Dr. Isabelle Bichindaritz.

Bichindaritz came to SUNY Oswego after working as a research staff scientist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and as an assistant professor in the computer science program at the University of Washington Tacoma.

Bichindaritz specializes in artificial intelligence and applications to medicine, and has designed several computer science based systems throughout her career.

“These are data analytics systems that understand new knowledge and trends and improve automatically over time,” Bichindaritz said. “We build systems that [improve their expertise] as they go, just like a human being.”

Bichindaritz’s systems are designed with a medical twist; she designs these systems to work alongside physicians, collect all the data that is relevant to a patient or situation and then create a treatment plans for that patient.

Bichindaritz has worked on systems designed to treat patients that suffered from hypertension, eating disorders or patients who had undergone stem cell treatment. Her systems have been used at major hospitals in Paris as well as at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

“They are innovative because medicine is a complex domain, there’s more data and more information that needs to be integrated to make a decision,” she said. “They can be used to do anything from providing advice to suggesting a diagnosis.”

Bichindaritz’s research focused on case-based reasoning and data mining in medicine and biology, which will continue to be the center of her studies now that she’s at SUNY Oswego.

In addition to teaching, Bichindartiz hopes to work on another decision support system, which was inspired by some of her early research on mining literature.

“We need these graduate certificates to deal with the fact medicine uses more devices and technologies.”

“There’s so much going on in the applied areas that in some of the core areas, like data mining, we lose track of some literature,” she said. “I’m interested in designing an automatic system to track literature in all these areas, so we’ll have a much better idea of what is going on in medicine and technology.”

She admitted that her interest in this future system stemmed from a personal problem.

“I’ve been designing systems for physicians, but now maybe I want to design systems so I can do my work better,” Bichindaritz said.

It was her role in helping develop the new graduate certificate programs in health information technology and integrated health systems that drew Bichindaritz to SUNY Oswego.

“I’m very excited because this is an opportunity for me to re-center on what I like to do,” she said. “We need these graduate certificates to deal with the fact medicine uses more devices and technologies.”

Bichindaritz will teach the majority of the classes in these new certificate programs. She hopes to produce strong graduates that the entire community can benefit from, as the programs were designed to fill a need in Central New York.

“I want to apply this research I’m doing here to help companies, hospitals or health care providers to improve health care and health research in the area,” she said. “I’m happy to see a lot of interest by Welch Allyn and other major companies and I’m looking forward to meeting with some of these researchers.”

But at the heart of her interest, Bichindaritz hopes to help people.

“Some people like to contribute to the well being of society,” she said. “What I want to do is develop these programs and really make them successful and help service the region. That’s my goal.”